


gasoline

by maelidify



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-07
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2018-09-22 14:52:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9612587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maelidify/pseuds/maelidify
Summary: The AU where Murphy is aimlessly driving down route 50 and on the run from the law. The same AU where Emori lives in a car and steals laptops.





	1. morning is a sickness until it is a death

(It’s morning again, because morning is unavoidable, morning after morning after morning.)  
  
The room’s one occupant shifts under the scratchy motel blanket, buries his face in the pillow, and realizes that the pillow smells like spit.  
  
“Another glorious day,” he mumbles into the spit-pillow. The words don’t come out clearly: “ _amoooo gloors der_ ,” is what he sounds like. Close e-fucking-nough. He thinks of the wrench under the bed. He thinks of the wad of cash still in his pocket, slimmer than yesterday.  
  
The hotel room isn’t _terribly_ trashed. Not like the last one. This one only has a smattering of beer bottles on the otherwise-pristine desk, some clothing scattered on the floor, the blanket of one of the twin beds strewn somewhere. Easy to clean up. Damned if he’s gonna clean it up, he thinks, but at least it’ll be easier on whoever is saddled with the task. A nameless, faceless maid. He pulls on his pants, winces at the sunlight drifting through the cheap blinds. Realizes that he’s gonna have to wash his clothes at some point, probably. Realizes that someone is probably looking for the car he’s driving, that the mud on the plates won’t hold for long.  
  
He has had this thought process every morning for the past week. He wonders how long he’ll hold out. He wonders where he could possibly go next.  


* * *

  
Because Murphy sometimes tries to make the facts solid in his head and unslippery: there was a week a long time ago which was hell, which was sickness (his own), and death (his father’s) and dying (his mother’s, slowly, the horror-story smile she had at three in the morning when he’d wake up and see her shivering on the porch, the clink of a bottle of something, probably whisky but maybe beer, sometimes, the stench of loneliness. That house was something lonely and empty, even with two people living in it, one growing, one slipping carefully out of her skin).

That week had been three years ago, at seventeen, and he never left that week behind him, even when he left that old monster of a house. He went to college and then almost prison and then,  
  
the week before this one,  
  
it was sickness and death and dying, all over again, and in a different variation of the same shitty pattern.    
  
Sickness was him, because he was a sickness, and the death was something he was blamed for by his dick of a roommate but didn’t cause, not directly, and the dying was a girl his roommate was fucking, a girl Murphy had shot, aiming for said roommate. There was a girl dying, and Murphy was no longer safe in that town, and he needed a new car and a new everything else.  
  
You might say death is new. Not to Murphy. An old, wrinkled possibility, and it sits in his mind like a piece of fruit, rotting away.  


* * *

  
So Murphy strolls through the motel parking lot at six in the morning, feeling heavy, like something about to fall off a tree, and there’s a tan car, small, unobtrusive. Something old but not so old as to be rare. A Civic or a Corolla, he thinks, and gets closer, and thinks yes, a Corolla.  
  
They’ll know where he’s jumping from. The car will be stolen and his old car will be found, with mud on the license plates, and they’ll put two and two together but hopefully it won’t be a pressing concern, not until the girl dies, anyway, and it’ll take a while for them to figure it out, and maybe by then he’ll be in Mexico or Canada, or somewhere not here. He’s not great at planning things. He’s not great at maps.

He’s also not great at the wrench trick, but he’s not terrible at it either. After a few tries, the car door is open. He glances at the corresponding motel window, and it’s still dark behind curtains. Good.  
  
It’s when he slings his stuff into the passenger seat that he realizes that whoever owns this vehicle has a serious hoarding problem. He recognizes it from his mom’s room, and the porch. Backpacks upon backpacks litter every available bit of space, and at least four old laptops, and the floor is carpeted with beef jerky wrappers and old, half-empty soda bottles. There is a fat pile of blankets in the back seat, and a pile of sweatshirts in the passenger seat and, come to think of it, he is now perched on a pile of books. He swipes them aside without reading the titles, because that kind of thing takes a longer allotment of time than he currently has.  
  
Oh, well. It’s too late to break into another car, and he can sort through the shit later, maybe find something useful to him.

When he fumbles beneath the steering wheel, he finds that the car’s owner has made his job easier for him. The wires are already stripped, waiting to ignite something in the vehicle’s belly.  
  
So he starts it and feels the rumbling and, driving now, wonders how much longer he can stay on route 50, thinks that Mexico is more practical than Canada in terms of distance, thinks that he has no marketable skills. His nose itches, there’s a heavy knife in his pocket. And suddenly, so suddenly that it almost seems natural, there’s a knife pressed against his throat.  
  
His breath catches. The road is straight, ongoing ahead of him, like a bunch of water going and going. And the knife, which is attached to a hand, which is attached to an arm and a person, presumably someone who had been hidden in the blankets in the backseat, presses into his skin lightly and he doesn’t turn around, just keeps driving because what the fuck do you do in this situation?

And there’s a voice, low and warm and female, this person has a voice.  
  
The voice says, “So, where are we going?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things I looked up for this chapter: 
> 
> -how to hotwire a car  
> -how to break into a car  
> -how to break into a car with a wrench
> 
> \---
> 
> I was so proud of this meet cute until I realized that my brain had definitely snatched it from Once Upon a Time's "Tallahassee".


	2. synthesis

He never realized he could be this calm.  


He says, “Want me to pull over?” to the person in the backseat.  
  
The sun is rising in a slow yawn behind them; in the rear view mirror, he can make out dark eyes and a tangle of  brown hair. He should be trembling. He isn’t. This is just life screwing him over as per usual, nothing to see here. 

Her warm breath is in his ear. “You didn’t answer my question.”  
  
_You didn’t answer mine._ Does he want to risk that response? Yes, but he also doesn’t want to die.  
  
He is locking eyes with her in the mirror, unblinking, the road fairly straight and ongoing. This subjugation feels like rust, like an old role in his old, soggy life. But still. Those hooded eyes look like planets.  
  
“I don’t know,” he bites out. “Mexico, maybe.”  
  
A soft bark of a laugh. “But you’re going west.”  
  
“I don’t have it all that figured out.”

“I can see.”

He swerves, and her knife presses harder against him, forcing his head back and up.  
  
“Eyes ahead,” she orders. “Neither of us wants to die right now, or am I wrong?”  
  
“You’re not wrong.” He settles for glaring at the road ahead of him, his brain taking in too many facts at once. That a woman had been in this car already-- sleeping? in this car already-- that there were piles of clothes and technology-- flea markets? stolen goods?-- and that the wires beneath the steering wheel had clearly already been stripped for hot wiring of the car, which was an older thing, easy to miss, a perfect mark for his amateur thief's eye.  
  
He processes this and wonders if the synthesis of this knowledge could do literally anything to help his situation.  
  
Shouldn’t her arm be getting tired? He says, “Sorry I stole your car.”  
  
“Shut up.”  
  
She must be figuring out what to do with him. Why hasn’t she demanded he pull over and kicked him out of the car?  
  
Because, he realizes, he’s seen her. He knows what car she’s driving, what things are in it, possibly what she looks like.  
  
He can use this to his advantage. He continues: “So, when did _you_ steal it?”  
  
Her eyes are unimpressed but they crinkle with something. “What’s your name, car thief?”  
  
He usually goes by his last name, which he doesn’t want her to know. “John,” he says instead.  
  
A police car buzzes by them, which gives him a strange shock of hope and dread. He’d forgotten, just for a second, that he was, for all intents and purposes, on the run. The woman in the backseat swears under her breath and slinks down a little, so that she’s firmly behind him, arm strained around the bulk of the seat. It can’t be all that comfortable.  
  
“Paranoid, are we?” he says, even though there’s still a knife pressing into him, now slid down to his collarbone.  
  
“Didn’t see you trying to get their attention yourself,” she says. “Here, take this exit and pull over."  
  
He obeys; he grins. His life is at risk, probably, but he’d forgotten that he was on the run, just for a second. He's oddly grateful for that, and suddenly wants to know everything about this woman and this car, why there's so much shit in so many piles, why she was sleeping in a motel parking lot. You know, little things.  


He pulls over on a sketchy little side street, and she jumps into the passenger seat with the grace of a feral cat. The knife is still in her fist, clenched in this weird mitten thing that covers her left hand, but it isn’t held against his skin anymore. She’s rubbing it against her right hand’s nails, as though she were filing them. Weird, but he can handle that.  
  
He now gets a good look at her. She’d clad in layers of grey and black clothing, a light tattoo etched across her brow, two studs in one eyebrow and one beneath her nose. Her skin is desert-brown and he has to take a deep breath all of a sudden, like there’s sand caught in his throat and he has to fight it to get any air in.  
  
And she’s young. Not as young as he is, but young.  
  
“You’re running too,” she finally says. The way she’s sitting, perched on a pile of clothes, cross-legged, is pure confidence. Maybe she’s a criminal too, but she doesn’t feel the least bit bad about it. He’s sure of that. “And I get the feeling it isn’t for being a car thief.”  
  
“You tell me yours, I tell you mine.”  
  
“Are you in a position to bargain, car thief?” She says the words with a warm smile though, like a teacher teasing a child. That doesn’t sit well with him, and he shifts in his seat to glare over at her. Her eyes still look like two planets, dark heat, something unknown.  
  
“I could grab that away from you in, like, a second.”  
  
She laughs. “I’d like to see you try.” He laughs too. Why does he laugh?  
  
He’s still laughing when his mind re-settles on the reason why he’s in this mess. The girl, Raven, shot in the spine, life leaking from her back. The boy, Wells, dead. He didn’t kill him, he didn’t kill him. He stops laughing.  
  
She’s looking at him intently. She knows he’s going to tell her his story; she’s controlling him, almost, with that gaze of hers. Soft and dangerous. It makes him feel safe, and oddly ashamed, as though he didn’t want to disappoint this stranger who had just held a knife to his throat.  
  
“I got blamed for a murder,” he says, finally. He slinks in the seat, rests his knee on the steering wheel. His own blade shifts in his pocket, but he doesn’t consider taking it out. “And shot someone. She’s probably dead now. And I ran.”  
  
He doesn’t know how he wants her to respond. She processes the information as she looks him straight and serious in the face and, with a nod, turns her attention to his satchel.  
  
“Anything good in here?”  
  
“What, are you gonna rob me before throwing me out?” Or killing me, he doesn’t add. There are worse ways to go. He’s in the eye of a storm. Nothing’s okay about this situation, but he’s okay here.  
  
“No, idiot.” She pulls out an old t shirt, the wrench, a book of poetry. She thumbs through it with a half-smile, and he hates safety, he does, when safety is so whirling and uncertain and molten in his chest, when a woman fascinates him when he isn’t in the mood to be fascinated. “We’re driving to Arizona.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Said to a friend while writing this chapter:  
> "Ff question-- so you're a morally ambiguous and slightly disabled thief, and a handsome stranger breaks into your thiefmobile while you're sleephiding in the back seat. So you wake up hold him at surprise!knifepoint while he's driving, like 'where we going, bro?' But, like, what then?"


	3. technicalities

  
The small tan car circles the gas station, vulture-like, slipping off the side road and back on with enough frequency to throw off anyone who might be watching.

“You didn’t say this would take forever,” Murphy complains. He’s in the passenger seat now; the woman explained this plan and took over driving at least an hour ago. He still doesn’t know her name or the reason why she’s going to Arizona or, for that matter, why she’s letting him tag along. Except for the fact that the reason why doesn’t matter. She must feel it too, that strange, unsettling easiness that shouldn’t be there at all.  
  
“Shut up, things take time,” she murmurs, distracted. Her hands are wrapped around the steering wheel, and he notices for the first time that her hidden left hand curls a little awkwardly around the wheel. She’s looking out the window; his eyes travel from her arm to her neck, the tanned length of it, the soft curve of her chin. She’s deceptively soft. He bets her skin is riddled with coarse, invisible scars.  

“We’re gonna run out of gas before we get any gas,” he continues, stubborn. “Great plan.”  
  
“Do you _want_ to get your own ride? Maybe steal another car that is obviously already stolen?”  
  
“How was I supposed to know?”  
  
“I would have known in a heartbeat.”  
  
“Well, sorry I’m not a fucking _vagabond_ .”  
  
“I hate to break it to you but…”  
  
The woman slows down mid-sentence, peering through the windshield and steering the car slowly into the gas station. A sleek, white car is parked just a little too far up the fifth pump, and they park in back of it, front to gleaming bumper.  
  
“Finally,” he grumbles, reaching for the door handle.

“Shh.” She grabs his wrist with her right hand without breaking her glance ahead. It feels so normal, her hand on his skin. “Wait until he’s inside.”  
  
An elderly man has exited the car and is approaching the gas station, walking slowly, step to step, hair a faded wool gray.  
  
“Little old, isn’t he?” Murphy says casually. His hand is still curled around the door handle.

She laughs. “We’re taking a paid-for pump. This isn’t exactly highway robbery.”  
  
Technically, it is. Murphy doesn’t have a conscience, though, so he slips out of the car once he sees the man at the cash register through the window, the morning light glinting off the glass.

It’s a simple plan, a little silly, a little flawed. She would have preferred to siphon the gasoline, but she’s lost the correct equipment to accomplish that kind of task. This will do, she’d said. She’s done it plenty of times with her brother. (“Tell me about him,” he’d said, and she’d fallen silent, thumbing at the radio dial.)  


* * *

He stumbles into the gas station, taking half a second to note his surroundings: two people, a child reaching for a bag of Takis, the TV playing some story about a Frida Kahlo painting, a CAUTION: WET FLOOR sign propped against a low shelf. Perfect. Knocking over an entire shelf of granola bars and, incidentally, tripping the man at the cash register, sales slip in hand, Murphy slips a little _too_ well on his two feet. As the man stumbles and catches himself, Murphy tries his best impression of injury (it isn’t completely ungenuine: he’d landed squarely on his tailbone), facing away from the store’s two occupants, and the man kneels next to him.

  
“Son? Son, are you alright?”  
  
This should give the woman enough time to slip out of the car, crouch next to the man’s gas pump, and fill up their vehicle. Their. His brain trips over the word and then frames it.  
  
Their. There. They’re.  
  
He wonders how they’re going to sleep that night. He wonders why she trusts him, and why he should trust her, even a little bit. He does, instinctively, and it doesn’t make any sense so it can’t be real, so he should be ignoring the question that sits in his chest. He focuses instead on the men talking, and the news story still playing (who was Frida Kahlo, anyway? the woman with the monkey?), and the little kid exiting the store, Takis presumably in hand. Good for her.  
  
Enough time has past. The man wants to call 911, so Murphy sits up and coughs.  
  
“And they say there are no more Good Samaritans,” he mumbles, and bolts through the door before either of the men can blink. The car is started and he leaps into the passenger seat, his accomplice spinning away from the gas station before anyone can get a good look at the car. Hopefully.    
  
He’s breathless and giddy; when he looks over at the thief woman, she’s grinning softly.  
  
“Easier with two,” she says. There’s something sad in that statement, and he looks away from it, whatever it is.          

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a little short, but I wanted to put something up here to distract us from that Very Very Very Stressful Episode we just had to watch :) :) :) :) 
> 
> The next chapter is almost ready, and there's much more to it. 
> 
> Googled for this chapter:  
> -How to steal gas  
> -Cars old people drive


	4. when summer is getting tired

At night, they pull into a rest area, nestling the car on the far side of a long, tired row of trucks. There is a heavy fog of silence as he watches her pretend she isn’t watching him. She rummages through a canvas sack and emerges with a few bills.  
  
“Now, we get coffee,” she announces. Murphy feels oddly disappointed. Without meaning to, he had been imagining the way she would look while sleeping. Her eyes soft and closed, her energy curled around her.  
  
“Do you sleep, ever?” he asks as they slip from the car. His hoodie is pulled up over his face, but he still feels uneasy going into a public place. He hasn’t caught his face on the news yet, but what can he say, he’s paranoid.  
  
“Eventually.” She pauses; a police car screams past on the highway behind them, but doesn’t get off at the rest exit. They both breathe again and Murphy again marvels at the pounding in his chest, how, when shared with another person, there’s something nearly invigorating about it. Nearly.  
  
It is a smaller rest stop, inside, just a McDonald’s and a small gift shop. A woman and a young child nibble at french fries at one of the few tables at the corner, and Murphy suddenly remembers that he’s hungry, that he hasn’t had a thing in his stomach all day.  
  
“We should maybe get food too,” he says, casually. He looks over at her, marveling at her small stature. She’d seemed such a force to be reckoned with in the car, but standing, she is a good half a foot shorter than him. Their shoulders are nearly touching, and he stands slightly behind her as she deliberates.  
  
“Are you asking me on a date, John?” She’s making fun at him, but with the way she’s smiling back at him, amused and warm, he doesn’t feel all that offended. The fluorescence of the rest stop casts her features into new light. She looks less harsh, somehow, smaller. Her eyes have a gold hue, and the light bounces from her eyebrow studs, tangles into her hair, and she’s real, she’s a whole, strange person standing in front of him. For some reason, this fact strikes him as alien, the idea that this stranger could be real.  
  
“You mean our little gas station heist didn’t count?” He says it lowly and he isn’t serious, of course, but she laughs, and it twists inside his stomach, like there’s something unfurling there.  
  
“Don’t worry about food; I’ll take care of it. Just get us coffee.”

She slips the wad of money into his hand, and her gloved fingers linger in his for a moment, strange, stiff. Then she is gone.  
  
Ten minutes later, he waits by the entrance with two warm coffees and realizes that he’s close to dependent on this nameless woman who’d threatened his life just that morning. He could leave right now, if he wanted to. Sneak onto a truck flatbed or something, But then he wouldn’t get to see how she looks when she’s sleeping, and, let’s be honest, he doesn’t have much to look forward to at this particular point in his life, and he’s gonna take what he can get.

  
Not that he has a _thing_ for her or anything, he reminds himself. That would be unhinged, dangerous, unnecessary...

  
His eyes drift to a television that’s playing soundlessly behind the McDonald’s. It’s that same news story about the painting and he tries to remember something, anything, about Frida Kahlo, who he read about once in college, but all he can think about is how strange he feels, out of body in this humming fluorescence. The situation he has left behind doesn’t feel real. This woman walking towards him doesn’t seem real, and he wants to know how she feels so intensely that it surprises him, that he decides to ignore it, to store it away in the back of his mind, let it get dusty.

So. She has returned, shifting from foot to foot, full of energy. He’s almost surprised; she could have left him at that rest stop, with only two black coffees to remember her by. He doesn’t know, exactly, why she didn’t. But there she is, slipping out of the gift shop.  
  
“Here,” he says, handing her one, and she takes the cup, fingers folding around it a little less than gracefully.  
  
“Quick,” she says, and their eyes meet in a way that feels inevitable. The sip of coffee that he takes burns his tongue.

* * *

  
They drive another twenty minutes to another rest stop, this one just a bathroom and a row of trucks, drivers nodding off or walking around to stretch. They don’t talk until they get there, and as soon as she parks, the woman opens her bag. 

  
There’s a handful of candy bars, some jerky, a couple of sleeves of crackers, an orange.  
  
“You got all this from the gift shop?” Murphy is impressed.  
  
“Child’s play,” she responds, not without some pride. Her thumbnail digs into the orange, peeling the skin with a snap, and he tears open one of the sleeves of crackers, all but inhaling them, two, three crackers at a time.

She eats the orange slowly, deliberately, peeling it piece by piece. She offers him one and he takes it. Her fingers are sticky and the fruit is sweet, and he suddenly somehow feels like he’s being _consumed_ by this woman. He doesn’t know if he likes it, but he isn’t complaining, either.  
  
“So,” he coughs, trying to dislodge whatever sensations are passing through him, “how does this sleep thing work?”  
  
“Incrementally. That’s what the coffee is for.”  
  
“What?”  
  
She grins at him. “Drink some, sleep for an hour, and then the caffeine kicks you awake.”  
  
“Not very restful,” he observes. “So when’s naptime?”  
  
“Soon.” She eats another slice, chews, swallows. He watches her dark throat, her hands, one still gloved.

“Is it because you don’t trust me?” he asks. About the not-sleeping-yet thing, but maybe about other things too. ‘“Cause I wouldn’t blame you.”  
  
She studies him carefully. “I trust you.”  
  
“Yeah?” It doesn’t surprise him too much, even though it should. Further proof of his encroaching insanity. “Then why don’t I know your name, or why you’re living like a train bandit? Minus the trains?”  
  
She finishes the orange and tosses the peels out the window. She stares at the darkness, the white trucks, the whispering traffic, and he watches her stare, and watches as she turns back to him.  
  
“My parents couldn’t take care of my brother and I,” she said. “We were both born… different, and they didn’t have the medical resources. We got lost in the foster system, and finally got out, and never wanted to be at anyone’s mercy ever again.”  
  
Quite a sob story, but she doesn’t seem mournful. If anything, she seems hardened, as though she’s talking about someone other than her.  
  
“So,” she finishes, “that’s why I’m living like a train bandit, minus the trains.”  
  
That makes him smile for a moment, and she smiles too.

“Emori,” she says after a moment. “I’m Emori.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hahahaha so I thooouuught this was a longer chapter than the last one, but maybe not? Life has been Distracting me, but I'm still very into writing this story and maybe even finishing it one day! Thanks for sticking with it, those of you who are still reading. 
> 
> While writing, I asked myself:  
> -What season is it supposed to be, anyway?  
> -Is it easy to steal from rest stops?  
> -How hungry and sleepy are these kids right now?


	5. crawl space blues

He sleeps first, curled up in the backseat, and is still alive when he wakes up. So that’s good.  
  
He comes to in short waves, not the caffeine kick that he was told about. He’s having a dream about a woman eating an orange, and then a woman listening to the radio softly, and then he realizes that the radio is playing over in the awake world, and there’s still a thin barrier of sleep between him and that place. Then it fades, and it feels like a wave rushing over him, and he is peering at the back of Emori’s head, the curve of her shoulder from behind the front seat.  
  
Emori. He’d said the name last night after she offered it to him. A soft name, pretty and strange. Sneaky. A sneaky name. She’s slouched in the front seat, knees against the steering wheel, and he can see her jeans are a little torn around the knees. She hums along with the radio a little bit, off-key, but only slightly. Emori.  
  
“Your turn?” he finally says, and his voice cracks with the sleep that he hasn’t entirely shaken off. She turns, her face in shadow. It’s still dark out, just a little corner of white morning in the sky, glinting off her hair, which is a rich brown. Shit. Shitshitshit.  
  
“Shit,” he says without meaning to.  
  
She does this half-laugh, half-frown thing. “What?”  
  
“Nothing,” he says, looking at her. Nothing.

* * *

  
The day is an exhausted blur: rest stops and more rest stops, Emori typing furiously on a laptop, frowning at the keys, slipping granola bars into his sleeve under her watchful eye (“good, John, but if you’d lingered a second longer, you would’ve been caught”), waiting for her in the car, reading _Last Night of the Earth Poems_ as she sneaks out more food: muffins, popcorn, dried mango and, once, an entire bucket of greasy chicken. He doesn’t ask her how.  
  
He finds himself, several hours later, pacing on the patio of a large, ivory-white house, watching Emori pick the back lock, tongue peeking from between her teeth.

The darkness is heavy and there are no cars in the driveway. Still, Murphy feels uneasy.  
  
“You sure you can disable the security system?” he says, and she laughs a little as the door swings open. She finds the white security box swiftly and, fingers impressively quick, begins to punch in numbers. It takes about thirty seconds for the faint beeping to stop.  
  
“So you know this place?” he says casually. He isn’t exactly the paragon of morality, but something about the unforgiving doorknob, the rustle of the lock settles on him uncomfortably. The house is crowding all around his shoulders and he doesn’t know why they can’t just keep stealing from public places.  
  
Houses are different. They belong to someone, and they’re meant to shut other people out.  
  
She looks at him for a moment, a slight frown turning around in her eyes, and nods.  
  
“They have my brother,” she says.  
  
That leaves him momentarily wordless. “He’s… what?”  
  
“The people who own this house. Otan used to work for them. He betrayed them, and they have him.” She looks away, and he can see something cloudy about her eyes. So this was the pain she held when mentioning her brother. He nods, taking in the slight way her hands twitch.  
  
“So you’re here to…?”  
  
“Gather information.” She brushes past him and he watches how the light from the window plays with her hair.

“I see,” Murphy says. She disappears upstairs and he wonders if he should follow her. Instead, he slinks into the kitchen and opens the cupboard. He’d rather raid the fridge, but cans of soup and beans are more likely to last. He piles them into his bag, distracted momentarily by the light outside because it _is_ bright, and then he realizes it’s red and blue and loud, and before he can think better of it he is halfway up the stairs.  
  
He thinks he hears Emori whisper _John_ from one of the bedrooms and when he walks inside, her hand slips over his mouth and she hisses a _shh_ into his ear.  
  
He nods but her hand doesn’t move. They’re crouching next to a vanity and now he can hear footsteps downstairs, and the click of a police walkie, and low voices. Emori’s breath is warm against his neck and the hand she has pressed into his mouth is the gloved one, the left one. His heart is racing. He doesn’t know if it’s from the cops or from the woman whose body is warm in back of him but he feels like his skin is loose, like his heart is rattling around in it.  
  
She moves her hand and he shifts to look at her. The room is dark and he can’t read her expression, but she stares up at him and reaches up to touch his cheek softly.    
  
“Come on,” she whispers, and inclines her head towards the closet. They creep inside, closing the door behind them, and there’s a trap door in the ceiling, leading up to the attic.  
  
“You knew this was here?” he says lowly. The sharp look in her eyes means _quiet_ and he climbs the ladder after her, and waits.

* * *

  
An hour or three later, they quietly climb down from the balcony that leads to the yard.

  
“Goddammed neighborhood watch,” Emori grumbles once they’re on the sidewalk again. The car is parked a good block away and they walk swiftly through the shadows, keeping to the side of the street with fewer streetlamps.

  
Murphy realizes his hand has come to rest on the small of her back as they walk. He hadn’t seen it move and he pulls it away quickly, ducking into the car once they round the corner.  
  
“We’re lucky they didn’t see the car,” he comments awkwardly. Emori nods, deftly starts the engine and pulls into the street. The only noise is the low grind of tire on gravel and the shifting of gears, and the occasional cricket hum of sprinklers in the distance. Murphy tries to concentrate on those things, but his mind drifts to Emori grabbing him harshly upstairs, and her thumb on his cheek, and her even, focused breath as they hid in the attic crawlspace. He has seen her extremes, and her precise energy, and he still doesn’t know what to make of it. Of her.  
  
“Did you get what you went there for?” he asks and idly grabs her bag, which she’d tossed in the backseat.  
  
“John, don’t--” she starts, glancing at him quickly, but another car emerges behind them and she turns back to the road, driving evenly towards the highway. Her face is clouded again and he frowns, wondering what she was going to say.  
  
“Don’t what?” He wants to tease her, but there’s a serious expression on her face and something dark twists in his gut. He reaches into the bag and emerges with a diamond necklace, and then some sort of old-lady pin embedded with rubies, and then a small gold ring.  
  
It takes him a minute to process, but her guarded expression and the decidedly not-intel haul send a clear message. “That place had nothing to do with your brother,” he concludes, “did it.”  
  
Emori says nothing.

* * *

  
They exit the highway as the sun creeps along the horizon, and Emori finally pulls over at a small dive motel. Not unlike, Murphy thinks wryly, where this mess had started.  
  
“Should I even bother to ask what you’ve doing?” he says and she glares at him. There’s something soft in her eyes, though, and he looks away. “Not that you’ll necessarily, you know, tell me the truth,” he mutters.  
  
It was smart, though, he concedes. He must have been looking uneasy as he broke into that house with her. She was just ensuring that he stayed there with her, backing her up while she committed her little robbery. Playing on his sympathies and all that. It stung, but he had to admit it was clever.  
  
“Stop whining,” she says lightly, and if her tone is a little forced, he really can’t say. “We could both use a night’s sleep. And a shower.”  
  
“A morning’s sleep, you mean.”  
  
She reaches for a small pouch in the backseat and grabs a wad of cash.  
  
“Go get us a room,” she orders. “You’re less recognizable than I am. Pull your hood up, though.”  
  
“Aye aye,” he says dryly, a little annoyed, but he’s doing it, isn’t he? He’s doing whatever the hell she wants him to.

* * *

  
The atmosphere is different in the room. Emori brings in two laptops and opens them at the desk, typing furiously one-handed into a coded screen and frowning at the words that appear. Murphy sits down at the edge of the bed near the desk, feeling the space between them strangely, and the silence too.  
  
“You didn’t have to lie to me, you know,” he says finally.  
  
“You were restless,” she says without looking away from the screen. “You were gonna bail on me.”  
  
“I’m here, aren’t I? Not that I have any reason to be.”  
  
She looks up from the screen and sighs, standing and crossing to the bed. It dips beneath her weight and even though he doesn’t want to look at her, he does.    
  
“The trap door,” she says. “In the closet? You were right, I saw it before the cops showed up.”  
  
“Yeah, and?”  
  
“I was going to hide.” She says it softly and he realizes how vulnerable she looks without her jacket, hair thrown into a ponytail, legs crossed beneath her. He wonders if she’s using that to her advantage.  
  
But then he considers what she’s saying.  
  
“So why didn’t you?” he asks slowly.  
  
She snorts. “John, you went into the kitchen. I saw you. There’s a door in the kitchen, but you went running up the stairs like a clumsy dog.”  
  
“I wasn’t that loud,” he says defensively.  
  
“You wanted to save me. To play the hero.” The words are gently mocking, but there’s no bite to them. The bed is small, he realizes. Their knees touch and he looks her in the eyes, the deceptive honey to them, the smooth brownness. His hand finds hers.  
  
“Why do you wear this?” he asks softly, lightly pulling on the material of her glove. Her whole body tenses and then relaxes and he sees some sort of resolve settle into her gaze. She doesn’t break eye contact with him as she slowly removes the dark material.  
  
“Oh,” he says, looking down at her hand. Her fingers are long and fused and twisted, and when he looks back at her, he sees something shut down in her eyes. She’s prepared for his reaction, whatever it might be. If he had an honest to god heart, that shift in her eyes would break it.  
  
“That’s actually pretty fucking sweet,” he says, honestly. “You shouldn’t hide it.”  
  
“Liar,” she replies, but that softness is back in her eyes and maybe if he studies them enough, looks at them and wades through them enough, he’ll be able to understand her.  
  
“I’m not,” he says. “Trust me, I’ve known liars.”  
  
And then, not quite knowing why, he kisses her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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>  You sure you don't know why, John?


	6. bitter skin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a content warning: there is some of The Violence in this chapter.
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At first Emori leans into him, but then she swiftly pulls back and stares at him, evaluating.  
  
“What?” Murphy asks, missing the softness of her lips already. There’s a grin at the corner of her mouth now, and as she pulls him towards her he bites it softly, enjoying the small gasp and the way her fingers tangle in his shirt.  
  
“Good,” she breathes, and something in his stomach tightens. She always thinks she’s _teaching_ him something. He leans into her kiss almost vengefully, unused to this, the chaos of her skin, her right hand tugging at his hair. This could consume him if he isn’t careful. He isn’t careful. He opens his mouth against hers and tugs her down, so he’s laying on the bed, her weight pressing him into the mattress.    
  
She sighs a little into his mouth and he realizes he could drown in this and he takes her hands in his. One smooth, one rough. He curls his fingers around hers and she freezes suddenly, dark eyes unreadable.  
  
“What is it?” he asks, and she climbs off of him. The missing weight feels like a surgery, a careful absence. She sits back down at the computer, back to him, shoulders tense.  
  
She is unreachable now. “What is it?” he asks again, and she types wordlessly for a moment.   
  
“We don’t have time for fun,” she says. There’s a smile sneaking into her voice and he grins slowly, unthinkingly, trying to calm his body down. He isn’t used to this; wanting the feel of someone’s skin on his, the hovering ghost of their taste still there, wrapped around his tongue.  
  
“Fun, huh?” he says, curling into the feeling.  
  
“Shut up,” she mutters, typing some more. Then: “Greer.”  
  
“Greer?”  
  
“Greer,” she says, craning her neck to grin at him and tucking a lock of tangled brown hair behind one ear. “That’s where we’re heading tomorrow.”  
  
“Whatever you say, boss,” he says and watches her smile as she stands, as she peels one of her layers off. There’s a tee-shirt underneath, and why didn’t he find that out for himself when they were busy with one another earlier? She kicks off her boots and climbs into the other bed next to his; there’s a lead ball in his stomach.  
  
“Don’t trust yourself?” he asks, trying not to sound disappointed.  
  
She grins at him. “No. I don’t,” she says, and turns off the light.

* * *

  
_In the dream, Murphy is a child._    
  
_There’s his mother; sober, then not sober. She fluctuates._  
  
_“Come inside,” she tells him, but he runs away. Now is isn’t a child; he is a wolf, and the street is dark. He’s trying to find another wolf, one with a twisted paw, but her car is disappearing into the distance and then it no longer exists. His mother is still there, outside a different house. The house they just stole from._  
  
_“Come inside,” she says again, but she’s Raven now, and her spine is bleeding a trail from Kansas to Arizona._

* * *

  
When he wakes up, he stares at the ceiling. Morning after morning after morning. Summer is tired outside the window, sneaking cruelly through the gaps in the shitty brown curtains.  
  
The power button on one of Emori’s laptops blinks lazily in the half-light and his bitter skin starts to shed, just a little bit. He turns, hoping to catch her sleeping (she hadn’t slept in the car and he’s still curious-- what will her face become when it’s relaxed?), but her blanket is crumpled and he hears the shower running. He tries not to feel jealous of the abstract notion of water; he stands to stretch and feels almost fond of the shitty brown curtains that don’t quite cover the windows.  
  
There’s a standard hotel coffeemaker and some wrapped styrofoam cups next to the TV, so he fiddles with it. It sloshes when he moves it, so maybe Emori made herself a cup earlier. He wishes he hadn’t slept through her waking, whatever her morning movements were. Slow or quick, efficient or lazy. The quickness in her opening its eyes, taking some of that bright morning for itself.   
  
Fuck.  
  
He slips some of the cheap coffee grounds into the maker, frees a cheap cup from its styrofoam prison. He’s losing his mind, and who for? A stranger he can barely trust?   
  
“You should shower,” she says from behind him. “You don’t know when your next chance will be.”  
  
“Is that a hint?” he asks dryly. He doesn’t want to turn around and look at her, clean and damp and standing behind him, so close he can feel her warmth on his shoulder blades. So close he can smell the soap, the strong sting of shampoo. He turns around. She’s fully dressed and toweling off her long hair, and there’s the soft, dark curve of her jaw, and there are the shadows where water sneaks through her shirt at the elbows, at the collar…  
  
Maybe she sees it in his eyes, whatever it is he’s feeling, because she smirks and stalks over to the computer. His gaze follows her. Okay. Shower it is.

* * *

  
In the car, it is almost easy to ignore the dream. He fiddles with the radio while she gets back onto the highway. He thinks of houses, of wolves, of the lazy grip of her gloved hand on the steering wheel. When he emerged from the shower earlier, her left hand was already wrapped back up, and he found he missed it intensely. A vulnerable, gorgeous, strange part of her that she’d allowed him to see.   
  
One station has old, faded country shit, and one has that same pop song that’s been playing all summer. He flips on the news, and it’s politics and oppression until it’s that damn story about the missing Kahlo painting again. When he goes to change it, she stops him.  
  
“I want to hear it,” she says. There’s a smile on the corner of her mouth, but a sad one. He listens to the drone of voice and realizes, oh yeah, it was stolen from a museum in _Arizona_. A shock to his chest, almost like being winded; he is impressed.  
  
“The fuck?” he says and she laughs.  
  
“It wasn’t me, before you ask.”  
  
“Like you expect me to believe that.”  
  
“It was my brother.” She grins into the unfurling sky, the empty road. “He wouldn’t have been able to do it without my help, though.”  
  
He’s a little bit in awe, but he hears that dark thread in her voice. That loneliness is there again, that small, hidden part of her. Suddenly, he thinks of a road unwinding in blood. He thinks of a gun, not his, smoking in his shaky fist. His hands clench and he looks out the window at the sparse fields disappearing into the distance and being replaced and disappearing again.  
  
Maybe that’s why Emori and her brother became thieves. Out of necessity, of course, but there must be a heady kind of power trip in being able to make something disappear.

* * *

  
The day is darkening when they enter Greer. Most of Arizona is arid, dry, but Greer is all forests and trails and angry pine. The sunset is a cracked egg over the river they pass on a small road; the light is brilliant but Murphy isn’t used to bright things, has only just started to gain an appreciation.  
  
They drive through a few different camping trails, listening to the faint voices on the radio, these strangers who lack immediacy, who only exist to reinforce the outside world. Eight o’clock rolls around and everything is gray and silent as they finally come to a stop outside a cabin.  
  
“Not creepy at all,” Murphy remarks as they emerge from the car, as his joints pop and his stomach makes a low grumble. Their meals had been sparse, mainly consisting of granola bars they’d swiped the day previous and large cups of coffee that cooled down too soon.  
  
“Here,” she says, and slips a knife into his hand. The knife she’d used against him just the other day. He strokes it almost fondly and slips it into his pocket as she opens the trunk and takes out a small handgun.   
  
“Not loaded,” she explains, tucking it into her pants, “but they don’t know that.”  
  
“Who’s they?” he asks, and she doesn’t turn around to look at him.  
  
“They have my brother,” is all she says, and he follows closely, trying not to lose her in the darkness.  


* * *

  
The cabin is filled with piles; old records, CDs, books, dishes. The walls feel like they’re closing in on him and he focuses on Emori, the strong cast of her shoulders as she leads him to a side room where a bald man is sleeping. There’s something concave about his face, a structural abnormality that makes it look fractured.   
  
Without missing a beat, Emori shoves him. A whirlwind. Murphy leans against a wall to watch as the man wakes up with a start, as he glares at Emori, oddly calm for someone who was just woken by an infuriated and very dangerous woman.  
  
“What are you doing here?” he asks bluntly, sitting up, and she grabs his shirt, snarls like an animal.  
  
“Where is he?” she asks, voice low. The man goes to push her away, but she holds the gun to his head, her grip on it unwavering. Murphy slips his hand into his pocket, just to feel the cool handle of the knife.  
  
“He’s dead,” the man says, not breaking eye contact with her. “You betrayed us and Baylis killed him.”    
  
“You’re lying,” she says.  
  
“You both knew what would happen,” he says and, so quickly it can barely be anticipated, she smacks him in the face with the handle of the gun, which comes away bloody. He calmly wipes his lip, now swelling up.   
  
“Where is he?” she asks again. She’s trembling now, just a little; if her precise rage wasn’t dangerous enough, this volatility certainly is. He can see the focus in her face waver, the gun shake just a little in her fist. The man doesn’t answer.  
  
“Where is it?” she says lowly, shifting the subject. “Tell me where it is or _Baylis_ will have to clean up the mess I leave.” The way she says this name: a maggot, or a devil.  
  
When he says nothing she strikes him again and Murphy doesn’t move, just watches. Idly, his conscious begins to itch, but there’s something magnetic about her rage, about this chaos.  
  
When she strikes him a third time, she seems to break, and the man knows it. His eyes spark with fear. This is someone who has worked with Emori before, who knows how controlled her approaches usually are.   
  
“North,” the man coughs out, finally. She hits him again.  
  
“Omaha,” he says, eyes growing desperate. “The basement of _LaHaye’s_.”  
  
She pauses and hits him once more, the movement sudden, almost refined compared to the earlier hits. A hit with a different purpose; it leaves him unconscious, and her entire posture shifts. “Come on, John,” she says, still looking at the man, the figure slumped on the bed. Her face is calm again, her motions fluid as she backs away, hand steady on the passive gun.    
  
“We don’t have very much time,” she says when they get back into the car. “He’s going to warn Baylis when he wakes up.” She swears under her breath. “I should have killed him.”  
  
“Then you’d be wanted for murder along with art theft,” Murphy says. The crack of his own voice almost shocks him; he’d nearly lost himself, he’d been so enraptured by the drama playing out in front of him. By this bright woman’s darkness, and by how swiftly she’d collected herself after seeming to lose control.   
  
He has a suspicion, and he voices it. “Did you know he was dead?”  
  
“Otan?” she says, glaring at the dim road ahead of her, at the maze of trees and low, ominous bodies of cabins. Her shoulders are tight, but she is steady, her voice soft. “I suspected it.”  
  
And, he mused, she used the idea of her own surprise, the concept of her own shocked rage to scare the man into giving her information. Smart. Amazing, the way she could tap into her own emotions like that, and push them away when they no longer suited her.  
  
Terrifying.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he offers. There’s a lot sitting in the air; the day is a lot heavier now, at its close. The trees, flashing gray-white as the car passes, then sucked back into shadow like everything.  
  
A ghost of something passes over her face, heavy and sorrowful, and is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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> Shorter title, same fic. :) I never gave up on this one, just... let it collect dust for a while. Both this title and the longer title ("gasoline coursing through my soul") are taken from "Outlaws" by Delta Rae.
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> Shoutout to infernalandmortal for keeping me company on tumblr while I worked on this, and for her help with some upcoming plot points. 
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> Researched for this chapter:  
> -What do hotel room coffeemakers look like again?  
> -How thirsty is Murphy, anyway? (Researched by: rewatching selections of Wanheda Part II and Exit Wounds)


End file.
